 Hello there, it's Sandy and I'm going to do the long-awaited Nina vs. Hammer Mill test along with some rainbow colored hummingbirds that I'll be creating from reverse confetti stamps. I've stamped it on the hammer mill on the left, Nina on the right so you can see the color difference right away. There's also a big weight difference between the two, even though they're 80 pounds. Even in the stamping, I was very surprised. I stamped both of them twice in the Misti so I could get even stamping and the hammer mill in two stampings was still kind of grayish. It did not stamp as well as the Nina. I was not really expecting that but I don't call that a deal-breaker because I'm a terrible stamper anyway and half the time I end up with my stamping having to be covered by my coloring because I'm a bad stamper. So I am going to be starting here with the Nina and I'll give you my blending tips on this one since I know how this will work. I started with my most intense color. I wanted some areas to be this really strong bright pink and I'm moving inward from it using lighter colors. I'm just going to step down the colors to be softer so that when I get to the parts where I'm going to blend with another color, I'm blending a light color into a light color. If you've ever tried blending a light and a dark color together, you know how hard that is. It's very difficult. So if you were to try to blend that dark pink into a pale blue, you'd be fighting it for a long time and when you fight things for a long time you end up with either muddy colors or you end up with a lot of bleeding because you're soaking the paper trying to force the blending to happen. But since I moved outward with the lighter pinks as the pinks and the blues start to mix at the edge, I'm working with two light colors and it just makes everything a lot easier. Instead of adding a green to the mix so that I have yet another color to blend into things, I just put some yellow down that is going to mix with the blue and be fine along with that. So I can create a green rather than having to have one more marker to try to figure out how to blend it. I can just extend the blue to blend with the yellow. And then I am going back in with the different colors to add intensity to certain areas that I want to be stronger and brighter. With Neenah cardstock, one of the things that I do is if I end up with too much of one color in an area, I can push in like more of this RV10 and it will displace some color that's there. So if I get too much blue in there, I can go back in with the pink and push out the blue. And in some cases you'll find that is really helpful. So now I'm going to try it on the hammer mill. And there's a number of things about this paper. It's extremely smooth. It feels more like my Copic sketchbook paper in that kind of way. It's just the smoothness of the surface which is not a deal breaker either. It just feels very different when you're putting the marker down. But what I began to notice pretty quickly is that the colors were not as intense on this paper as they are on the Neenah's. They weren't as bright just to start off with. I'm not sure how much you can really see here on camera because cameras capture things the way cameras do. And the color though, I just was a little bit on the disappointed side. Now when I say disappointed, it doesn't mean that you would notice it. If you saw this coloring separate from the, and even if I saw the coloring separate from the color that I normally see on my Neenah, I probably wouldn't notice. So the average human being, even somebody who's a Copic colorist is probably not going to go, oh, I betcha that's a different paper. No, it's not that bad. But it's still a difference. It's definitely a difference that I saw. There was also a big difference in how they blend. And this might explain some of the confusion that I've had with some students who have tried asking me questions and like, I can't get this to blend or that to blend or this ends up looking really muddy or whatever. Because what I noticed is that the hammer mill does not want to lift or displace color. The way I talked about the Neenah does, where you can pour more of the pink in and it'll push out the blue. It does not do that nearly as much. It barely will do it at all on the hammer mill, which could explain the muddy colors that you might be getting. So even that purple there is just kind of muddy and mottled on the right one, which is the hammer mill. And the one on the left is the Neenah. And there's just an intensity difference in colors that is very subtle, but it definitely can happen on the two different kinds of papers. Know that you can still go back in and work on intensity. I wanted to brighten up the greens on both of these. So I just went in and added yellow on top so you can keep working on your paper. But I think with the hammer mill, if you use that regularly, you may want to let it rest longer because of the way that I found it works. It just it just doesn't want to fix the modeling. And normally when I get that modeling and the word I'm using is M-O-T-T-L-I-M-G. It's like a pockmarked kind of surface. When I get that on Neenah, I can take the mid tone marker usually or the, I guess it depends on what kind of colors and what area it's in, but I'll take the mid tone and just do one quick stroke right across the surface. And it will just fix that modeling. That did not work on the hammer mill at all. So you know, I definitely can see why some people are having challenges if that's the paper they're using. And I haven't been answering that because I didn't know it until now. It took me a long while to find the hammer mill paper. And once I did, I got the test out here. But unfortunately, I'm not a fan of it. Let's just put it that way. I will continue to use the Neenah. Now the Neenah is about, I guess, three times as expensive. You know, something in that range, depending on where you get it. I'm going to link both of them. So if you want to buy the cheap roll, cheap roll, cheap ream of hammer mill and try it yourself if you're a Neenah user, you can certainly try it and see what you think of it. And I am however going to not be using it for my Copics because I don't find it to be good paper for these markers. It makes your life just more difficult than it needs to be. And I would rather use a better paper, even if it costs more so that I can get some work done and not have to be fighting it all the time. Because this one felt like an argument with the paper when I was trying to color it and I don't like arguing paper. I like liking paper. This stuff is really slick so it might work well for pen and ink work. So I might try it with that. And if I don't find that it works with that, I don't really know what else I would use it for. So I will probably don't need it to my church because it's not even good for card bases. It's really lightweight. And that was also, you know, one of those things, it says 80 pound on there should be 80 pound like the Neenah and it's not because the way everybody measures their paper is different. So you can't count on something like 80 pound being 80 pound in everything. It's not apples to apples necessarily. But on both of these, I have masked out the beautiful little birdies so that I could airbrush with the Copic Airbrush a bokeh bokeh background, just leaving some white ish circles to create that light, that little sparkling of light. And then I will recover the other one with my masks. This is some eclipse tape that I've cut these guys out. You can use these a couple times, they stay about as sticky as a post-it note. So eventually they do get destickified. And then I'll just airbrush this one. So this little graph is over on my blog. You can see it here where you can pause the video if you want to read it at this moment. But this is my general assessment. If you are on a budget, you could certainly use the hammer mill. Just know that there's going to be some techniques that are going to be really hard for you. So don't beat yourself up for it. Blame it on the paper and get mad at the paper. And by yourself a small pack, you can buy a tiny pack of the Nina over at Ellen Hudson if you want to just try a few sheets of it. But here are the finished cards and here is where you can see the Nina stands up on its own as a layer. There's no paper behind it. It's just that layer with dimensional down the two sides of it. I tried that with the hammer mill and it sagged. So I ended up putting the layer of pink right behind the hammer mill so that it would not sag into the card itself. And that gave it a little more structure and stability. So just know that it's much, much lighter weight paper. That's it from me. I hope that was helpful information. If you've struggled with your hammer mill, now we know why. And hopefully I've given you some tools to try to do something different. I will talk to you guys later. See ya. Bye bye.